


anthropomorphism

by deniigiq



Series: electric sheep [1]
Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Androids, Artificial Intelligence, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-19
Updated: 2018-01-19
Packaged: 2019-03-06 23:45:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13422159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: Matthew Michael Murdock was a person who had been taken, killed or next to killed, and turned into a droid.Foggy sobbed as quietly as he could into the toilet.





	anthropomorphism

**Author's Note:**

> there are some graphic descriptions of how people get turned into droids and a brief mention of suicide. Matt also shocks himself as a way of asking for help, which may be read as self-harm. Finally, sometimes thinking too much about AI sends me right into an existential crisis, so if you too struggle with that affliction, please look after yourself as you need to.

There was a droid sitting on his bed. Oh god.

It was definitely sticking its fingers in the electrical socket on the wall over and over, twitching violently at each shock before proceeding to _continue_ this behavior.

Oh god he’d already broken the droid and he didn’t even know where it came from or who it belonged to. Oh lord. Oh Jesus. Someone was going to walk into his dorm right now and accuse him of property theft and vandalism.

He just got to law school, he wasn’t ready to go to prison. The droid’s head tilted and it turned to face towards his frozen body in the doorway. It was obviously an expensive model with thick, human-like brown hair and supple synthetic skin. Foggy had only seen droids this nice in store windows in the nice part of town. They removed the droids at night, presumably to put them in a safe, and posted not one, but two security guards outside those kind of businesses. The droid considered him for a long moment, evidently scanning him with its droid senses. Whatever it was looking for, it apparently didn’t find because it immediately returned to assaulting the electrical socket.

Foggy was trying to formulate a coherent expression which included “how did you get in my room?” “who do you belong to?” and “can you stop doing that before someone sues me for property destruction?” when his RA poked his head into the room and declared,

“There you are!”

Foggy leapt two feet in the air. The droid gave no indication it had heard. The RA raised an eyebrow at it and then raised an eyebrow at Foggy.

“Sorry about him, he keeps wandering out of the computer lab. I think we need to update his software.” Foggy stared at the RA, relieved that this was apparently university property but also concerned that Columbia’s technology simply _wandered away_ on its own. He was too poor to have ever encountered any technology which needed anything less than a good smack and a better prayer to even turn on. Apparently this was how rich kids did things. He took a deep breath.

“It’s fine. Um, actually I don’t think it is. Isn’t that gonna hurt him?” he asked, watching the droid’s hair stand on end before settling down. Rinse, repeat.

“Yeah, no. It’s not a big enough current for him. He’s probably just doing it because it feels funny,” the RA said, “Oh. Don’t worry that he’s here, you’re not in trouble or anything. He tends to come to this room when he’s bored.”

Foggy didn’t know how a droid could be bored. They had like, entire databases to process all day or something. How could it be bored?

“Um,” he said.

“Yeah, no worries,” the RA squeezed past him to get through the doorway and walked over to the bed; he laid a hand on the droid’s, which got its attention. It turned its face towards the RA like a friendly cat getting a nice pat on the head, and let him pull it off the bed and away from the socket. It laid its hand in the crook of the RA’s arm and followed him back towards the door. Foggy was surprised at the fluidity with which it moved. It was like a person, all languid limbs and even strides. It was creepy as fuck.

“Okay Matt,” the RA told it, apparently not acknowledging that it didn’t quite make eye contact, “You’ve had your fun. Now back to the lab.” The droid took a moment to process the command and after a rueful (could androids be rueful?) twist of the head back towards the socket, it allowed itself to be led past Foggy into the hall.

“Room’s all yours, Nelson. Don’t forget to keep your keys on you at all times!” the RA barked over his should before disappearing around the corner.

Foggy sat down heavily onto the now-unoccupied bed. Great start.

 

 

Foggy wasn’t that familiar with droids or anything, even now after having been at Columbia for a month and having had to use one to register for damn near everything in this school, Jesus Christ, whatever happened to self-service?

He did, however, know enough about them to tell that this droid was malfunctioning. “Matt,” the errant android of Lab 34, he now knew, had somehow bypassed his door’s lock and security code and was performing its favorite self-flagellation exercise on the edge of Foggy’s bed. Foggy tried to get its attention by saying “hey” and waving at it, but no such luck. Droid was bound and determined to get its socket-y fix. He stood up and was about to stick his head out of the room to call for the RA when he heard the droid move; he looked back and saw that it was staring at him. Well, kind of. It was staring at his shoulder. Something seemed to be wrong with its facial optics.

“Um, hi.” He said, waving a little. The droid perked up and moved its hand away from the socket. It didn’t reply though, just looked very interested. Foggy hadn’t planned past step Call RA and was lost for words.

“You, uh. You like that socket, don’t you?” he tried. The droid processed for just a moment too long before nodding slowly.

“Okay, um. That’s good. Um.” He’d made it to law school and couldn’t inspire a robot to move; he felt appropriately humbled.

“Um. Listen,” he tried, “I don’t need a bot right now and I think you’re supposed to be in your lab. Do you, uh, follow?” The droid processed.

“Negative. Presence in lab is not requested. Current function listed: standby.” Foggy couldn’t help but find it strange that whoever made this droid went through all the effort of making it appear human, but then instructed it to speak like that. It was slightly assuring that he could clearly tell it wasn’t human though. Then his slow human brain actually caught up to what the droid had said.

“Standby? Does that mean that you’re actually bored?” he asked it. The droid hummed quietly before answering.

“Correct.”

“Isn’t bored a feeling? Can droids have feelings?” Foggy stamped down the impending existential crisis; he would handle that after the droid had left the room.

“Invalid question. Please submit request again,” the droid said.

“I said, do droids have feelings?” Foggy asked. The droid tilted its head and stared over Foggy’s right shoulder.

“Invalid question. Please submit request again,” it said. Foggy sighed. After a few beats of silence, he sighed again as the droid went back to poking the socket.

“Okay, pal. Sure, whatever you want. Let me get your handler,” he left the room for the RA, who dutifully came to retrieve “Matt.”

 

 

He was mid-existential crisis and had made very good progress on cataloguing every poor decision he’d made which led him to law school when his door locked itself and scared the shit out of him. But sure enough, it was his favorite, masochistic friend, come to pay its monthly penance to the electricity god. He didn’t even try to stop the droid as it made its way to the corner of the bed he was not currently laying on, ripped off the socket protector Foggy had invested in in his hubris, and commenced shocking itself. Foggy watched thoughtfully, still half shrouded in his duvet. From this angle he had a good view of the droid’s neck until it dipped into the white and blue “Columbia IT” shirt it wore. He wondered if there was some practical reason all of the droids on campus were dress in gray athletic tights and oversized IT t-shirts or if the uniforms were purely to show off the school’s android research department’s mastery of the human form. He hadn’t seen a bot with a flat ass yet and had the feeling that he never would.

He settled down into his pillow again, watching “Matt” do his thing and felt strangely comforted. At least, in this tumultuous, spinning world, “Matt” was a stable point; he (when did it become a he?) always made his way into Foggy’s room at 14:00 on a Tuesday, once a month. Foggy couldn’t predict which Tuesday because, as it turned out, “Matt” was a highly requested droid for the debate students and he was checked out from the lab more Tuesdays than not, but there was always 1 hour on some Tuesday in the month for socket-fun.

“Matt,” he said quietly, to get the droid’s attention. One of the senior students in his seminar had finally told him that the weird bot which invaded his room had malfunctioning facial optics which the IT department was fighting an uphill battle to repair. According to this source, “Matt” had come to the department as someone’s homemade pet project with severe hardware damage; even whispering about his hardware was enough to send some of the robotics grad students into despair and insight others to point angry, inarticulate fingers at Matt until some indeterminate impasse was reached. In short, Matt was a blind, otherwise fully functional, droid. Who liked pain--or the robot equivalent of pain.

“Matt,” he said again; the droid paused and turned his face to him.

“Nelson, please submit request,” he intoned without inflection.

“Matt, why do you do that?” Foggy asked.

“Invalid ques—”

“Yeah, yeah. I know. Okay maybe like this: what does that feel like?” he interrupted.

Matt returned his fingers to his lap while he processed.

“Input interrupted upon contact with outside energy source,” Matt told him.

Foggy raised his eyebrows. He wasn’t actually expecting an answer. In fact, he had kind of been hoping that Matt would keep repeating ‘invalid question’ until it formed some kind of constant Foggy could hold onto in his anxiety.

“Okay,” he thought hard about what he could ask to get more out of this, “Is the interruption of input a desired outcome?”

“Affirmative.”

Foggy couldn’t ask a droid ‘why.’ Not even the most advanced droids could answer ‘why’ questions without having been explicitly programmed with a sequence of responses.

“In the human body, is the interruption of input favorably comparable to sensory deprivation?” he asked, feeling quite pleased with himself to have formed such an articulate question. Matt hummed for a long moment. Wait for it. Wait for it. Invalid Quest—

“Affirmative.”

That. Was certainly. Not Invalid Question. He stared at Matt as Matt stared somewhere above his head. After about a minute of silence, wherein Foggy began having a totally different kind of existential crisis involving AI empathy and the legal definitions of humanity, Matt returned to the socket.

He left after about 15 minutes.

 

 

Marci was of the opinion that Foggy was obsessed with android ethics. Foggy was of the opinion that he wasn’t _obsessed_ he was interested. He certainly wasn’t disclosing to Marci that Matt has freakin’ feelings, damnit. And those feelings involve sensory deprivation? Why would a machine, whose entire purpose was interpreting input, want that input to stop? Wouldn’t that make the machine obsolete?

So Foggy had a few beers with the law students, and then he maybe had a few shots with the robotics department because it was a holiday party wasn’t it? No silly field-divisions here. Also, what do you guys know about AI and what exactly defines sentience in the field?

Ernst, one of the grad students who spent his waking hours writing AI code and adjusting verbal modulation in donated droids, explained things patiently to Foggy as his friends methodically attempted to bounce ping-pong balls into their uncovered solo cups from increasing distances. The conversation with Ernst, however, left Foggy unsatisfied. Okay, now he knew that AIs ran on learning programs, and no one really knew the extent of those programs, but the field was fairly certain that AIs didn’t _experience_ things, they interpreted and collated them into if-then functions. But if Matt’s desire for a halt in input was part of an if-then function, what was the “if?” What was causing Matt to want to interrupt his ability to feel. Or, Foggy realized with dawning horror, if AIs needed an ‘if’ to perform the ‘then’ function, and if they needed to have both functions to ‘exist’ as an AI, then why did Matt keep trying to halt all ‘then’ functions?

Was Matt trying to kill himself?

Foggy felt his stomach sink. He suddenly needed to take a step back. Matt was an AI, an android, a bot, he didn’t exist like people did. He never would; his entire being, thoughts and actions, were all based on some numbers saved onto some kind of hard drive in his core. Matt wasn’t a person. And yet. And yet.

Foggy had to verbally tell himself to ‘stop.’ He was the one who was imbuing Matt with personhood. People make things into people. Matt wasn’t a person, he wasn’t trying to kill himself, there was no one there to kill. Matt was just malfunctioning, something in his code wasn’t right. Ernst and Co. would sort it out, if anyone could it would be them.

He went back to his dorm a little bit early and feel asleep early thinking about all the things he’d ever made into people.

 

 

Matt wasn’t a person, but, Foggy learned, he might have been once. Foggy spent too much time studying, too much time drinking, and according to his cohort, way too much time with the robotics department. They were starting to adopt him. They’d even labeled one of their slightly charred, supremely uncomfortable folding chairs with his name. Foggy was a little bit touched.

But now he was also horrified. He had made a mistake. And that mistake was spending the night after his last exam for the semester with the robotics grad team after their last exam for the semester. They were all a toxic mixture of drunk-drunk and exhaustion-drunk. And Maiko, bless her, had actually taken his slurred “where do bots even come from?” seriously. Soberingly seriously.

“They come from people,” she told him flatly, suddenly staring into her mug. “Sometimes they are recently dead. Sometimes they are dying. There’s an option to donate your body to science, you know? For the last twenty years or so, people have had the option to specifically request to be used in bot research.” Foggy was sure that his eyes revealed his shock.

“They want to do it,” she told him quickly, “it’s all consensual. Some people are scared of death, you know? Some people are scared of rotting. And sometimes, its easier to um, let go, or uh, die, if you know that, physically, you are going to be safe or useful. I dunno, people always have their reasons. We are grateful to them. Always grateful to them. Try to be respectful to them…”she trailed off. Foggy noted that most people in the room were very interested in their cups.

“So they’re all…?” he started.

“No, not all of them,” Antonio told him. “Some of them are completely artificial. Those that we uh, harvest--oh god that sounds so much worse out of seminar—are kind of shells? Like, we can’t keep a lot of them because they’ll rot, so we replace their insides over time-- we model everything we have off of the existing, uh, stuff-- and you slowly replace their skin and even though its not them anymore, it kind of is. We shed our body cells all the time you know?. And some people find comfort in knowing that their faces and voices live forever, even if the uh, rest of them doesn’t.”

Foggy nodded; the grad team breathed in relief. George held her mug of shitty coffee aloft.

“To those who gave their lives,” she said, “May they find rest in the binary.”

A murmur shuddered through the group and Foggy clinked glasses with nine of the most human people he knew.

 

 

He watched as Matt’s neck strained and relaxed. Strained and relaxed. Strained and relaxed.

“Please submit request,” he intoned with his back still turned to Foggy. Foggy wiped at his eyes a little bit. Since the night of final exams, he couldn’t help but try to imagine the person Matt might have been before he became a droid. Ernst revealed that he had indeed been a person, but oddly enough, no one knew who he was or where he came from. Donors were usually exceedingly well documented, but Matt had arrived to the department already as a bot, a strange one with strange programming. Some of his codes could not be rewritten or erased and somehow, as was the way with some bots, they’d infiltrated every piece of replacement hardware. His skin, Ernst told him, had been an absolute disaster. Whoever had been working on him hadn’t bothered to graft away his scars, of which there had been many. The more senior cohorts had theories that he’d been part of some underground fight club or the boxing mob or that he’d been a hitman.

Foggy’s soft heart ached for that Matt; he desperately hoped that that Matt had consented to becoming a droid, but there was no way to prove it. That Matt was long gone, the closest thing to him were the strange, stubborn codes in his system which allegedly made him fight when provoked, cringe at loud sounds, and hold his arms out in front of him, as if feeling his way through the world. Foggy suspected, although he didn’t dare tell Ernst or Antonio, that Matt had always been blind and that, no matter how much they coded and fiddled, he would never see.

“Please submit request,” Matt stated again, startling Foggy out of his daze. Foggy didn’t know how Matt knew he wanted to talk or what even to say to him, but the weight on his chest felt heavier and heavier each moment he held out.

“Who were you before, Matt?” he asked. Matt processed. And processed.

And processed? If answers could not be found within 3 minutes, droids were programed to invalidate the question. Foggy didn’t know how long it had been, but it was certainly longer than 3 minutes.

Matt’s body suddenly jerked, then relaxed. Foggy realized that he’d shocked himself at the socket. He was a little glad for it; he was starting to feel extremely uncomfortable. He didn’t know if an answer would make him feel better. Or if it would make Matt feel anything at all.

Matt shocked himself again. And again.

Foggy placed a hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently.

Then he laid back down and turned away from Matt to stare at the wall.

 

 

“Foggy, have you seen Matt?” the RA asked as Foggy stuffed a duffle bag full of clothes and toiletries. It was winter break; his mom demanded him home for Christmas and then booked him a plane ticket, so he really couldn’t refuse.

“No, he hasn’t been in here today,” Foggy shot back.

“Huh,” he heard the RA mutter as he checked in other rooms down the hall.

A block away from the building, Foggy remembered that he’d left the charger for his phone lying on his bed. He turned back.

He opened his door and leapt three feet in the air. Matt was sitting on his bed in the dark. Foggy sighed.

“Matt, Angel’s been looking for you. You should go to him.” He said, groping around at the foot of his bed for the charger he knew he’d left there.

But it was gone.

He looked up to see that Matt was holding it, staring down at his lap. In stunted movements, he knelt down next to him. He’d never heard of a bot taking things before; they didn’t do that, they needed to be instructed to. He was the fifth person left in the building; the rest were RAs and one international student. Matt stayed stock still.

Foggy carefully wrapped his fingers around the cord of the charge and began to very gently pull it out of Matt’s grasp.

“Matthew Michael Murdock.”

Foggy’s eyes shot wide and he snapped his head up to see Matt still staring into his lap. Matt eased his grip on the charged, letting it fall into Foggy’s hands. He stood and, reaching towards the wall with one hand, exited the room.

Foggy went home.

 

 

Foggy googled Matthew Michael Murdock and then sprinted for the bathroom to retch into the toilet.

Matthew Michael Murdock was extremely handsome and extremely blind. He’d gone blind saving an old man from getting killed by a truck carrying a load of acid. His father was reported as having died two years later. He went missing around the age of 23. He was a paralegal who, according to his boss, had recently decided to become a lawyer and had applied and been accepted at Columbia. His coworkers had prepared a nice memorial for him on the anniversary of the day he went missing.

Matthew Michael Murdock was a person who had been taken, killed or next to killed, and turned into a droid.

Foggy sobbed as quietly as he could into the toilet.

 

 

Foggy met with the robotics team the day after break. They were jovial and bumping shoulders, jostling each other. Then he told them about the charger and they all shut the fuck up.

Then he told them about Matthew Michael Murdock and Maiko sat down and hid her face in her hands.

Then he told the lab coordinator and then they told the department chair.

And then Foggy found himself standing with a troop of scientists in the lab in a half-circle around Matt who stood silently, his arms at his sides, his gaze coasting straight into his audience’s faces.

The department chair said “Matthew Michael Murdock?” Matt turned his head towards the voice and tipped it forward slightly as if to say “Yes? I’m listening?”

The air was sucked out of the room and Foggy heard one of the assistant professors murmur “shit.”

 

 

No one had ever tried to reverse engineer a droid before, but Columbia’s robotics team was doing its damnedest. Foggy felt slightly helpless and very unsure about the ethics of the whole thing until Ernst bodily dragged him into the lab, plopped him down in front of a wire-wrapped Matt and said, “watch.”

He carefully flipped a switch which caused Matt to lift his head and open his sightless eyes.

“Mr. Murdock,” Ernst said, “what is the current outlook on the recreation of biological processes in androids?”

Matt had tilted his head towards Ernst’s voice. He waited a beat for answering,

“Well, honestly I’m probably not the best person to ask for any type of outlook.”

And Foggy wanted to cry, maybe did cry a little bit, but that was okay because Matt, well he wasn’t a person and he probably would never been Matthew Michael Murdock again, but he wasn’t just a droid anymore either.

Ernst, who let Foggy scrub furiously at his face, spoke up again.

“Mr. Murdock, do you want to be human again?”

Matt processed. And processed.

“I don’t think I was human to begin with. Let’s shoot for a middle ground.”

Foggy looked up and saw Matt’s face beaming a huge smile, and maybe he fell just a little in love.

 

***

 

Image by [hehearse ](http://hehearse.tumblr.com)

**Author's Note:**

> Update March 10: This work is now part of a series called electric sheep, but this chapter can be read as a stand alone/oneshot if you prefer.  
> I wrote it with the intention of leaving it as a one-shot, but couldn't quite get it out of my brain.


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